All during the day of March 29, Lawrence and his advance team moved into attack positions in the hills around the station, while closely watching the Turkish soldiers go about their routine: forming up for roll call, falling out for meals, performing desultory drills, still oblivious to the trap being set for them. Best yet, from Lawrence’s perspective, was the train that chugged into view that morning and came to a halt at Aba el Naam; destroying a Turkish train would be a great bonus to the operation, and he fervently hoped it did not push off again before the main assault party arrived.
That force began to drift in that evening, but to Lawrence’s dismay, it was not the eight hundred fighters he had been promised, but more on the order of three hundred. It forced him to quickly recalibrate what might be accomplished in the morning.
Throughout that night, Lawrence made his preparations. Small groups of fighters were dispatched to secrete themselves in the heights surrounding the station; once the assault got under way, the Turks would find themselves caught in an amphitheater of gunfire. One demolition team was sent to place a mine on the railway north of Aba el Naam, while he personally placed the one to the south, the first time he would put Herbert Garland’s mine-laying tutorials to the personal test. It was also here where he set his sole machine gun, in a concealed gully a mere four hundred yards from the track. With Medina forty miles to the south, Lawrence figured this would be the direction the Turkish garrison would take in retreat—or conversely, the direction from which any reinforcements might come—and the machine gun with its three-man crew would turn the open ground into a slaughter yard. So exhaustive and time-consuming were his preparations that when finally the attack was launched shortly before dawn, Lawrence had to be shaken out of a fitful slumber to observe it.
It started very well. The Arabs’ two mountain guns, or pack howitzers, had been tucked into hillside crevices with commanding views of the depot, and they opened up with devastating effect. Within moments, two of the station’s stone buildings had taken direct hits, the depot’s water tank had been punctured, and a train wagon parked on a siding set aflame. Simultaneously, the Turks scrambling for their trenches were discovering there was little protection to be found; with bullets coming in from three sides, they were just as likely to be shot in the back as in the front.
Amid the chaos, the train that had come into Aba el Naam the day before began to move off, attempting an escape south. As Lawrence watched in satisfaction, it tripped the mine he’d set, producing a puff of sand and scattered steel—but then, nothing. For what must have seemed an eternity, he waited for the machine-gun team hidden in the gully to open up, but all remained silent. Instead, the Turkish train engineers were able to dismount in perfect safety, slowly joist the engine’s damaged front wheels back on the track, then gather steam for a limping journey on to Medina.
Shortly after, Lawrence called off the assault. Turkish reinforcements would surely soon be on their way, and those soldiers below who had survived the initial melee were now protected by the cloak of thick black smoke that enveloped the station from the burning wagon. The only alternative to withdrawal, Lawrence reasoned, was a frontal assault against the Turkish trenches, an option likely to be as murderously futile at Aba el Naam as it had been on a thousand other battlefields.
Measured in terms of casualties—the way military men usually gauge such things—the engagement had been a great success. At the cost of a single fighter wounded, the Arabs had killed or wounded some seventy Turkish soldiers, taken another thirty prisoner, and undoubtedly disrupted traffic on the Hejaz Railway for some days to come. For Lawrence, though, it was a hollow victory, diminished by the knowledge of what might have been. If the machine-gun crew in the gulley had acted as planned, the hobbled train would have been shot to pieces rather than allowed to escape; as Lawrence soon learned, the crew had simply abandoned their position once the fighting around the depot started, either because they wanted to witness it or because they felt exposed being so far removed from the main rebel force. Similarly, if he’d had the eight hundred fighters promised back in Wadi Ais rather than the three hundred who had shown up, the outnumbered garrison in Aba el Naam could have been annihilated. Denied the unqualified victory he’d hoped for, Lawrence would only say about the battle that “we did not wholly fail.”
Surely deepening his disappointment was what the experience said of the Arab Revolt going forward. In urging Faisal to make for Syria by concentrating his attacks inland, Lawrence had vaguely talked of overrunning the isolated Turkish garrisons along the railway as they went. But what were the real prospects of that happening given the example of Aba el Naam? If the Arabs couldn’t sufficiently organize to defeat four hundred backline guardpost soldiers in a skirmish where they had commanded the heights and enjoyed complete surprise, what would happen when they were confronted by the several-thousand-man garrisons that awaited in the larger rail towns in southern Syria—let alone the ten thousand frontline troops who stood at their backs in Medina?
Yet, in a different way, the engagement at Aba el Naam proved something of a seminal event for Lawrence, as it lent proof to an idea—perhaps more accurately, a constellation of ideas—he had begun to formulate. By his own account, that process had started during those long days of illness spent lying in his tent at Wadi Ais.
At its core was the question of what the Arab rebels were truly capable of in the face of the Turkish army. Virtually to a man, the British advisors sent to the Hejaz since the beginning of the revolt were derisive of the Arabs’ fighting abilities. Indeed, Lawrence had shared something of that opinion with his observation that a single company of entrenched Turkish soldiers could put the entire rebel army to flight.
The problem with this view, Lawrence was coming to realize, was not just that it held the Arabs to European standards of warfare—standards totally unsuited to the Arabian terrain—but that it rather blinded those advisors to see the tremendous advantage that terrain might offer. In a word, space. Some j257,000 square miles of open space.
“And how would the Turks defend all that?” Lawrence asked. “No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? … Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked.”
If alien to many in the hidebound British military structure of the day, none of this was truly revolutionary, but rather the classic strategy-by-default of weaker military forces throughout history. After all, if one is outmanned or outgunned, charging straight at the enemy only ensures getting to the cemetery or surrender table that much quicker. What was unique was how Lawrence saw its application to the Arabian war.
Ever since his arrival, the overriding goal of both the Arab rebels and their British advisors had been capturing Medina, the event that would rid Arabia of four centuries of Turkish rule and allow the theater of operations to move north. The current campaign to prevent the Turks’ withdrawal from Medina had thrown a new complication into the mix, but the end goal hadn’t changed; for Briton and Arab alike, seeing the Ottoman flag come down from Islam’s second holiest city was the prize that would open the road to others. What Lawrence now saw was that Medina should not be taken, either by force or by surrender: “The Turk was harmless there. In prison in Egypt he would cost us food and guards. We wanted him to stay at Medina, and every other distant place, in the largest numbers.”
The proper strategy going forward, in Lawrence’s new estimation, was to keep the Turks settled into Medina almost indefinitely. To do that, it didn’t mean shutting down the Hejaz Railway altogether, as the British were hoping to do, but rather allowing that supply line to operate at just enough capacity to keep the Turkish garrison on life support. Sustained enough to surv
ive, but too weak to withdraw or go on the offensive, that garrison would then essentially become prisoners—even better than prisoners because the burden of sustaining them would continue to fall on the enemy.
This concept didn’t apply only to Medina. Once that garrison was rendered impotent, Lawrence foresaw, the Arabs could take their rebellion into Syria and pursue the same strategy there: ceding the larger garrison towns to the Turks while they roamed the countryside striking at soft spots of their choosing, constantly disrupting the enemy supply lines until the Turkish presence was limited to an atoll of armed islands amid an Arab-liberated sea.
Once this idea of the Arab force “drifting about like a gas” came to him, it was probably inevitable that Lawrence’s thoughts turned to that place on the map that had been a gnawing concern for over two months: Aqaba.
The tricky thing about Aqaba from the Arab perspective was that while it presented a trap should they go into it as junior partners of the British and French, the port was still vital for them if they hoped to push into Syria. If somehow the mountain range that lay between Aqaba and the Hejaz Railway could be wrested from the Turks, the Arabs would then enjoy a mere sixty-mile-long supply line for their operations in southern Syria, rather than the three-hundred-mile line from Wejh. But how to clear those mountains, and how to do it without being beholden to the British and French?
In pondering this dilemma earlier, Lawrence had settled on a rather obvious and conventional solution, pointing out that as the Arab forces moved north along the rail line, clearing the towns of Turks as they went, the Turkish garrison in the side spur of Aqaba would eventually be cut off; an Arab side force could then be sent over the mountains from the inland side to capture it. Now, however, with the “drifting like gas” concept to mind, he began formulating a far more audacious scheme. Taking Aqaba didn’t have to wait until the Turks’ inland garrison towns were taken, nor did it have to wait until the Arabs advanced north en masse. Instead, Lawrence believed that a very small and mobile force of Arab fighters might pass undetected all the way to the vicinity of Maan, the inland terminus of the road to Aqaba, and there conduct a series of seemingly random diversionary raids. With the Turks put on high alert by these attacks—which meant standing to in their defensive positions—and unsure where they might come next, the Arab force could then cross the mountains and fall on Aqaba from the landward side before anyone in the Turkish military leadership had time to react.
It was with these ideas in mind—still embryonic, certainly the staggering logistical issues involved not yet worked out—that Lawrence returned to Abdullah’s camp from his railway raiding forays in early April. There he found a plaintive note from Faisal awaiting him.
“I was very sorry to hear that you were ill,” Faisal wrote in awkward French. “I hope that you are already better and that you would like to come back to us in a short time, as soon as possible. Your presence with me is very indispensable, in view of urgency of questions and the pace of affairs.” He closed in a somewhat whiny tone. “It was not at all your promise to stay there so long. So I hope that you will return here as soon as you receive this letter.”
As quickly as he could manage, Lawrence set out for Wejh.
Chapter 12
An Audacious Scheme
So far as all ranks of the troops engaged were concerned, it was a brilliant victory, and had the early part of the day been normal, victory would have been secured.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL CHARLES DOBELL, ON THE BRITISH DEFEAT AT GAZA, MARCH 28, 1917
With the ramshackle outskirts of Wejh just coming into view in the predawn light, Lawrence ordered his small camel train to a halt. He hadn’t bathed since leaving Abdullah’s camp four days earlier, and out of a sense of propriety he wished to change out of his filthy, dust-caked robes before presenting himself to Faisal.
It was April 14, 1917. Lawrence had been gone from Wejh for just a little over a month, but he was returning to a world transformed. Indeed, the changes that had occurred in that thirty-five-day span, both on the global and Middle Eastern stages, were of such a magnitude he probably had difficulty absorbing them all at once.
In mid-March, just days after he had set off for Abdullah’s camp, the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty in Russia had come to an abrupt end. Faced with paralyzing industrial strikes by workers demanding an end to the war, and a semimutinous army that refused to move against those workers, Czar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate. The provisional government that had replaced the czar vowed to keep Russia in the Entente, but with the chaos worsening, there was growing doubt in other European capitals about just how long Petrograd might stand to that commitment. In fact, though no one yet realized it, the seed of the new Russian government’s destruction had already been sown through one of the most successful subversion operations in world history. On April 1, the German secret police had quietly gathered up a group of leftist Russian exiles, men just as opposed to the new moderate regime as they had been to the czar, and arranged their passage home. Among the returning malcontents was a Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, soon to become better known by his nom de cadre, Lenin.
But as unsettling as developments in Russia were to the British and French leadership, they proved a boon in another sphere. President Woodrow Wilson’s loathing of the retrograde czarist regime had played a key role in his refusal to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Entente. With the new moderate government in Petrograd, Russia was suddenly “a fit partner for a League of Honor” in the American president’s view. In concert with Germany’s renewed U-boat war in the Atlantic, and the exposure of an outrageous German scheme to lure Mexico into attacking the United States, it had provided Wilson with the political cover to finally declare war on Germany at the beginning of April. Given the staggering logistics involved in building the tiny American peacetime army into a major fighting force, and then transporting it across the Atlantic, it would be a long time before the American “doughboys” might significantly contribute to the Western Front battlefields—most war planners estimated at least a year—but the news came as a tremendous relief in France and Great Britain, both sliding ever closer to financial collapse as the war ground on.
There had also been a momentous event in the Middle East. On March 26, the same day that Lawrence set out to attack the railway garrison at Aba el Naam, General Archibald Murray had at last thrown his army against the Turkish trenchworks at Gaza. In a confused and fitful battle that had continued into the following day, the British had repeatedly appeared on the verge of a decisive victory, only to find new ways to fritter away their advantage, finally calling off their assault as Turkish reinforcements drew near. The result was quite different from the “great success” that Aaron Aaronsohn had noted in his diary, or the “brilliant victory” that Murray’s on-the-ground commander reported in his initial communiqué. Instead, and despite outnumbering the Turkish garrison by at least three to one, the attacking British had suffered over four thousand casualties while inflicting less than half that number on their enemy and leaving them in control of the battlefield. The outcome amply justified the taunting Turkish leaflet dropped on British lines in the aftermath: “You beat us at communiqués, but we beat you at Gaza.” By the time of Lawrence’s return to Wejh on April 14, General Murray was gearing up his forces in southern Palestine for another try.
In Lawrence’s telling, though, that day was most memorable for yet another event: his first encounter with Auda Abu Tayi.
Since his first visit to the Hejaz, Lawrence had heard of the legendary exploits of Auda Abu Tayi, a leader of the fierce Howeitat tribe of northwestern Arabia. For even longer, Faisal had been waging a charm offensive to bring the chieftain in on the side of the rebel cause, sending emissaries with notes and presents and promises, entertaining a parade of Auda’s tribal lieutenants. Now, with the capture of Wejh placing the rebels at the outer proximity of Howeitat territory, Auda had finally come down to the coast to meet Faisal in person
. At some point during Faisal’s and Lawrence’s reunion meeting that day, Auda was invited to join them.
Whether wholly accurate or not, Lawrence was given to penning very incisive and closely observed first impressions of people—and few made a bigger first impression on him than Auda Abu Tayi. “He must be nearly fifty now (he admits forty),” Lawrence noted in a wartime dispatch, “and his black beard is tinged with white, but he is still tall and straight, loosely built, spare and powerful, and as active as a much younger man. His lined and haggard face is pure Bedouin: broad low forehead, high sharp hooked nose, brown-green eyes, slanting outward, large mouth.”
Beyond Auda’s arresting physical appearance lay his charisma and peerless reputation as a desert warrior. “He has married twenty-eight times, has been wounded thirteen times, and in his battles has seen all his tribesmen hurt and most of his relations killed. He has only reported his ‘kill’ since 1900, and they now stand at seventy-five Arabs; Turks are not counted by Auda when they are dead. Under his handling, the [Howeitat] have become the finest fighting force in Western Arabia.… He sees life as a saga and all events in it are significant and all personages heroic. His mind is packed (and generally overflows) with stories of old raids and epic poems of fights.”
Although left unsaid, it would seem one reason Lawrence was so taken with Auda Abu Tayi was the stark contrast he drew to Faisal ibn Hussein. While Lawrence still had a profound appreciation for Faisal as the political guide of the Arab Revolt, the man who could gain and keep the fractious clans and tribes to the banner of the greater cause, it had become increasingly clear that King Hussein’s third son was not a natural warrior. To the contrary, and in opposition to the image Lawrence had first presented to his army superiors, Faisal appeared to quite abhor violence and to go out of his way to avoid participating in it personally, “a man who can’t stand the racket,” as Cyril Wilson once drily observed.
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